Wednesday, November 07, 2012

From Oracle SQL Developer to Data Miner

As mentioned in an earlier post How easy is it for a SQL developer/analyst to become a data miner?, if we consider data mining as just more sophisticated SQL queries, data mining is simply a natural extension of SQL programmer/analyst's daily job, i.e., querying the database. For example, a SQL programmer can write a query to answer a business question: finding people living in Boston, MA with annual income at least $50K and credit score 750 or higher. One simply puts the three conditions in the "where clause" as the following:
select person_id, person_first_name, person_last_name
from tbl_data_about_people
where
home_city='Boston' and home_state='MA' and
annual_income>50000 and
credit_score >=750;
Similarly, we can put a predictive function in the "where clause" to answer a more useful question: finding people living in Boston, MA who are 25% more likely to purchase a new car with 2 months as the following:
select person_id, person_first_name, person_last_name
from tbl_data_about_people
where
home_city='Boston' and home_state='MA' and
prediction_probability(model_likely_to_buy, 1 using *)>=0.25;
We can see how easy and powerful to use predictive models in SQL. A traditional Oracle SQL developer can greatly enhance his/her value by picking up those data mining functions. There are a number of good documents and sample codes available at Oracle's site, e.g,
The Data Mining Sample Programs
Oracle® Data Mining Concepts